Two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party spent months refusing to accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Here we are again, only this time it is some of our most renowned universities which are refusing to recognise it.

The grounds on which they are basing that refusal — that it closes down free speech and silences backing for the Palestinian cause — are as spurious now as they were in 2018.

It makes no more sense to argue that defining a form of race hate is an attack on freedom of expression than it would with a definition of sexual harassment.

The IHRA outline is a tool for identifying antisemitism. It does not provide, or even suggest, a sanction against it.

What should happen to someone deemed to have crossed the line into antisemitism is a separate debate — albeit one that is equally important and, in the case of some of the universities which are refusing to implement the IHRA definition, pressing.

This is the crux of it. Too often, Jewish students are faced with lecturers who spout antisemitic tropes in the guise of objective analysis — and when a complaint is made, the response is almost always that the lecturer is merely expressing an opinion.

Having an internationally accepted definition against which such words can be judged eliminates that excuse.

If a university then wishes to defend the use of antisemitic tropes under the guise of free speech, so be it — but it will need to make that case, rather than, as happens repeatedly now, denying even that there has been any antisemitism.

The IHRA definition is by far the most intellectually rigorous and it is to the shame of those institutions that refuse to acknowledge it.